What product can I use to safely sanitize my old hard drive of any sensitive data?

Answers Given

Answers Favorited

What products or best practices are there for completely removing all data from a hard drive? Is there a software based solution that is better than microwaving or physically disassembling the drive? What about with solid-state (flash) drives?

Maybe Ontrack Eraser can do the trick. My dad use it in his work, collecting computers from companies who wants to donate there old computers to Africa. They use the software because the company behind the software provides a certificate that stats that all data have been completely destroyed. They even say that it is better to use this software then to physically destroy the hard drive, because the drive can be reconstructed and analyzed.. But other then that, I don't not nothing about it.

The 7/35 pass options are called DoD standard but those were based on old paper about recovering data from MFM and RLL drives. Modern drives are completely different and can't be recovered as simply.

A single pass of zeros will be sufficient for spinning drives. Note that modern drives will automatically relocate bad sectors as it finds them and the zero pass won't write to those sectors, old data may remain on those sectors even with the 7/35 pass options as the drive skips over them anyway.

If you just want to keep people from using computer based recovery tools from getting data off your drive then a single zero pass will suffice. If you want to prevent more, then slag it, there are no ways to guarantee full erasure of absolutely all data.

Useful information in this blog, like this one must be maintained so I'll put this one on my bookmark list of memory card recovery. Thanks for this wonderful post and hoping to post more of this.
Visit this link to get Best solution to your problems http://www.manchester-datarecovery.co.uk

A cool tool can be any book, gadget, software, video, map, hardware, material, or website that is tried and true. All reviews on this site are written by readers who have actually used the tool and others like it. Items can be either old or new as long as they are wonderful. We post things we like and ignore the rest. Suggestions for tools much better than what is recommended here are always wanted.